Bad boy gone mushy

I read Following The Equator by Mark Twain not because I wanted to, but because I had to. I was editing a book on my city with Naresh Fernandes, the anthology that was to become Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai (Penguin India), and I felt one had to have read as much as one could. That was where I bumped into the durian for the first time, though he calls it ‘dorian’. “There was a great abundance and variety of tropical fruits, but the dorian was never in evidence. It was never the season for the dorian. It was always going to arrive from Burma sometime or other, but it never did. By all accounts it was a most strange fruit, and incomparably delicious to the taste, but not to the smell. Its rind was said to exude a stench of so atrocious a nature that when a dorian was in the room even the presence of a polecat was a refreshment. We found many who had eaten the dorian...